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by danaris 1509 days ago
Taxing consumption is inherently regressive. By its nature, it places a disproportionate amount of the burden on those least able to pay for it.
1 comments

There are ways to address that. For example - exempting certain things like staple food items.
No, there really aren't. You can mitigate the regressive nature of consumption taxes, but you can't eliminate them.

Fundamentally, poor and middle-class people spend a higher percentage of their annual income on goods and services than rich people do. There just isn't enough stuff that one could ever want to buy (or services to partake in) for rich people to spend the same proportion annually.

The best you'd be able to manage is limiting your consumption taxes to things that only very wealthy people can afford in the first place, like superyachts. But at that point, a) you're not managing to bring in a huge amount of revenue with it, and b) you might as well just raise the higher income tax brackets, or add taxes on wealth over $X amount.